ďBecause our intelligence agencies collect a vast amount of data but only see and read a small fraction. That does not constitute mass surveillanceĒ.

This is from GCHQ. They are quite clearly pathologically loopy.

All part of the continued propaganda effort designed to blur the distinction between 'Directed Surveillance' (requiring a court order, subject to RIPA and aimed at a specific entity/person) and 'Undirected Surveillance' ('drag-netting' data and instructing a computer to identify targets for further scrutiny).

The latter clearly does 'constitute mass surveillance', whether it is a human or a computer (operated by a human) that does the actual 'reading'.

Claiming that the vast amount of data collected is not 'read' by a human is logically no different to shooting someone and blaming the gun.

This John Oliver show is a cracker. He got out of his chair and went to interview Snowden._________________I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker

My guess is a disgruntled member of US military or an Islamic inspired attack in a stolen uniform.

Looks like I completely miss-read this one. Seems to be some local losers in a car-jacked SUV who took a wrong turn then panicked when confronted by gun wielding guard. White guard shoots black (cross dressing) man dead.

Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.ís invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated.

This is the power of an informed public.

Ending the mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen, but it is only the latest product of a change in global awareness. Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers.

Exposing the lies on which the NSA are trying to extradite him and the deeply unconstitutional nature of the Orwellian Patriot Act. Again._________________A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.

Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article depends Ė more on those in a minute Ė the entire report is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quickly whip up in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.

Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden ďhave blood on his handsĒ if there is ďno evidence of anyone being harmed?Ē As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed: ďThereís no evidence anyoneís been harmed but weíd like the phrase Ďblood on his handsí somewhere in the piece.Ē

The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The ďjournalistsĒ who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. Itís pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and weíre obeying. Breaking!

Turns out the Times made it all up. At the same time, itís just one example of something much more expansive: the entire world view of the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, and that means you too, is weaved together from a smorgasbord of made-up stories, narratives concocted to make you see what someone else wants you to see

In case you missed it:

Ilargi wrote:

In short, the propaganda we should be worried about is not Russiaís, itís our own. And it comes from just about every news article weíre fed. Weíre much less than six degrees removed from Orwell.

The author of the pile of horse manure that masqueraded as an article in The Sunday Times, Tom Harper, was interviewed on CNN. The full transcript can be found
here

A quick summary:

Ryan Gallagher wrote:

So, in summary: How were the files breached? "I don't know." Were the files hacked or did Snowden hand them over? "We don't know." Were MI6 agents directly under threat? "We don't know." How did the government know what was in the files? "That's not something we're clear on." Can you substantiate the claims? "No."

The interview is quite extraordinary because it makes absolutely clear that not only was this entire dubious story based solely on claims made anonymously by government officials, the reporters who regurgitated the claims did not even seek to question the veracity of the information. They just credulously accepted the allegations and then printed them unquestioningly. That really is the definition of stenography journalism ó it's shameful.

It's also worth noting that in Harper's interview he admits he has no idea how the Chinese and Russian governments supposedly obtained the files, yet the whole story was based on a bombshell claim that the trove of files was somehow "cracked" by Chinese and Russian government operatives (i.e. that the encryption on them was broken). As I noted above in point #9, if Snowden just handed over the files, why would these governments then need to "crack" them, unless the claim is that he handed over a set of encrypted documents? Either way, Harper says he has no idea how the files were obtained, so how does he know they were "cracked"? This central allegation seems to have been invented completely out of thin air, at worst a fabrication by technologically inept reporters who don't understand what terminology like "cracked" means, at best derived from evidence-free conjecture from spineless government officials too afraid to put their names to the claims

_________________A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.

Recently, a new wireless router called ProxyHam was developed to capitalise on many peopleís concerns, allowing users to remain anonymous online and giving false location coordinates to anyone who was trying to monitor them.

Plenty of people liked the idea of the device, and more suggested they were prepared to shell out their hard earned for it. The manufacturers, Rhino Security Labs, called it ďthe utmost in anonymityĒ, and penciled in an August release at Las Vegas Def Con.

And then it vanished.

Vanished. Without a trace, other than a brief statement from Rhino which effectively said, ďwe arenít releasing the device anymore and we arenít telling anyone whyĒ.

Source_________________I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker

ďThe goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route,Ē

Yep.

Edward Snowden wrote:

ďBy preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and theyíre in our pockets,Ē

Double yep._________________I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker

If you use google maps and have a google account try looking at your timeline. I personally find it useful, but obviously governments can find out roughly where I was every day that I had my phone switched on, with me and signed into google.

ďWhat is #Allo? A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request,Ē the whistleblower tweeted.

Quote:

While iMessage and Whatsapp provide the end-to-end encryption of messages automatically, Allo makes it more of a process, and, perhaps, is tricking you into giving up valuable information because youíre simply not used to having to turn the feature on.

Source_________________I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker